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"Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. In his poems, in which he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and masculinity. Hayes is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work. In praising Hayes's work, Cornelius Eady has said: "First you'll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you'll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world." Hayes lives in Manhattan, and he and his ex-wife, the poet Yona Harvey, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, share the custody of their two children.
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Even the most kindhearted white woman
Even the most kindhearted white woman,Dragging herself through traffic with her nailsOn the wheel & her head in a chamber of blackModern American music may begin, almostCarelessly, to breathe n-words. Yes, even the mostBespectacled hallucination cruising the lanesOf America may find her tongue curls inward,Entangling her windpipe, her vents, toes & pedalsWhen she drives alone. Even the most made upLayers of persona in a two- or four-door vehicleSealed in a fountain of bass & black boysChanting n-words may begin to chant inwardlySoftly before she can catch herself. Of course,After that, what is inward, is absorbed.
-From American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin (2019)
Even the most kindhearted white woman,Dragging herself through traffic with her nailsOn the wheel & her head in a chamber of blackModern American music may begin, almostCarelessly, to breathe n-words. Yes, even the mostBespectacled hallucination cruising the lanesOf America may find her tongue curls inward,Entangling her windpipe, her vents, toes & pedalsWhen she drives alone. Even the most made upLayers of persona in a two- or four-door vehicleSealed in a fountain of bass & black boysChanting n-words may begin to chant inwardlySoftly before she can catch herself. Of course,After that, what is inward, is absorbed.
-From American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin (2019)
Black Confederate Ghost Story —For Buggs
Attention African-American apparitions hung, burned or drowned before anyone alive was born: please make a mortifying midnight appearance before the handyman standing on my porch this morning with a beard as wild as Walt Whitman’s. Except he is the anti-Whitman, this white man With confederate pins littering his denim cap and jacket. (And by “mortify” I mean scare the shit out of him.) I wish I were as tolerant as Walt Whitman waltzing across the battlefield like a song covering a cry of distress, but I want to be a storm covering a confederate parade. The handyman’s insistence that there were brigades of black confederates is as oxymoronic as terms like “civil war,” “free slave.” It is the opposite of history. Goodbye plantations doused in Sherman’s fire and homely lonesome women weeping over blue and gray bodies. Goodbye colored ghosts. You could have headed north if there was a south to flee. In Louisiana north still begins with Mississippi, as far as I know. East is Alabama, west is Texas, and here is this fool telling me there were blacks who fought to preserve slavery. Goodbye slavery. Hello black accomplices and accomplished blacks. Hello Robert E. Lee bobble head doll on the handyman’s dashboard whistling Dixie across our post racial country. Last night I watched several hours of television and saw no blacks. NASDAQ. NASCAR. Nadda Black. I wish there were more ghost stories about lynched negroes haunting the mobs that lynched them. Do I believe no one among us was alive between 1861 and 1865? I do and I don’t. We all have to go somewhere and we are probably always already there. I know only one ghost story featuring a brother in Carrolton, Alabama, dragged to the center of town in a storm for some crime he didn’t commit. As he was hung lightning struck a window on the courthouse he’s been haunting ever since. Attention apparitions: this is a solicitation very much like a prayer. Your presence is requested tonight when this man is polishing his civil war relics and singing “Good Ol’ Rebel Soldier”* to himself. Hello sliding chairs. Hello vicious whispering shadows.I’m a reasonable man, but I want to be as inexplicable as something hanging a dozen feet in the air. *Oh, I'm a good old Rebel soldier, now that's just what I am; For this "Fair Land of Freedom" I do not give a damn! I'm glad I fit against it, I only wish we'd won, And I don't want no pardon for anything I done.
-From How to Be Drawn (2015)
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